When Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to muscle his way into Florida’s Legislature-driven redistricting process in 2022, lawmakers from both parties initially resisted – fighting his aggressive plan for months. 

“The external pressures are significant,” GOP state Rep. Tyler Sirois said back then.

“But this process requires us to follow the law.”

After rounds of combative hearings, intra-party clashes and vetoes, the governor ultimately overpowered lawmakers and rammed his plan through. 

Four years later, after Gov. Ron DeSantis called for an extraordinary mid-decade redraw of Florida’s Congressional district map, the Republican-controlled Legislature didn’t even try to draft its own proposal. 

Instead, in a process voting rights advocates decried as an “undemocratic power grab,” this week Florida lawmakers voted largely along party lines to rubber-stamp a new Congressional district map drafted not by the Legislature’s redistricting experts but by DeSantis’ staff. 

Lawmakers signed off on the plan even after a top aide for the governor who claimed sole responsibility for drawing the map acknowledged in public testimony he relied on partisan data to create it — a potential violation of Florida’s constitutional ban on drawing lines for partisan gain.

Republican state Sen. Jennifer Bradley was among just five GOP members who voted against the map. 

“I can’t do it,” Bradley said the day before the floor vote. “It’s just unconstitutional.”

Legal challenges are all but certain, once the governor signs the bill.

“We are calling on the courts to intervene and put a stop to this unconstitutional and undemocratic power grab,” said Genesis Robinson, executive director of Equal Ground, a voting rights group that has challenged Florida’s voting maps in the past. “Floridians deserve fair maps. And we will not stop fighting until we get them.”

Florida lawmakers’ norm-shattering push to approve new maps in a matter of days is a measure of fealty to President Donald Trump – who kickstarted the national redistricting frenzy – and a demonstration of DeSantis’ consolidation of state power in the executive branch. 

Legal challenges against the map may ultimately wind their way to Florida’s Supreme Court, where six of the seven sitting members were appointed by DeSantis – teeing up what could be a decisive blow to the voter-approved provision prohibiting partisan gerrymandering.

“This is a map that is designed and intended to rig outcomes and to benefit one political party,” said Democratic state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith. “Donald Trump’s Republican Party. In direct violation of Florida’s Constitution.”

‘This is about power’

Florida’s redistricting push is the latest in a wave of partisan jostling across the country, after the White House called on Republican-controlled states to redraw their maps to give conservative candidates the edge ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. 

Republicans already control 20 out of the state’s 28 Congressional districts – despite accounting for only 41 percent of the state’s registered voters, compared to 30 percent for Democrats. DeSantis’ proposed map is expected to give Republicans the chance to wrest control of up to four more districts, potentially cutting the state’s Democratic representation in half.

Drafted behind closed doors, the first time the public glimpsed the map was after the governor’s office shared the proposal exclusively with Fox News – color-coded in red and blue to show the intended electoral outcomes – before releasing the map to state lawmakers.

“Democrats and Republicans, y’all should be pissed off!” Democratic state Sen. Shevrin Jones told his colleagues. “Because it’s crazy that Fox News gets the maps before we – the elected body – get the maps.”

“The governor has no respect for us,” Jones added, “who are duly elected, just like him.”

The new map makes significant changes to four Democratically held districts in Orlando, Tampa and South Florida – carving up some of the state’s largest and most-diverse metro areas and splitting them four or more different ways, in a manner that elections analysts say breaks up communities of color and could further entrench GOP control.

Republican state Sen. Don Gaetz, who was asked by the Senate president to sponsor the redistricting bill, pushed back against concerns the map was tainted by partisanship.  

“I don’t think that the result of all this will be necessarily more Republicans in Congress. It may be fewer,” Gaetz said.

Already, the landscape of Florida’s congressional delegation is changing. The day after the map was released, veteran Orlando-area Republican Rep. Daniel Webster announced his retirement from Congress, saying he wanted to spend more time with family. Webster is among the GOP incumbents who had criticized the redistricting push, warning it was a “slippery slope” and “can come back and bite you.”

In advancing the map created by the governor, lawmakers are ceding one of their signature authorities – drawing the boundaries of each voting district – in a move that could help decide control of Congress and the fate of Trump’s second term in office. 

“Let’s not pretend that this is a real process. This is about acquiescing. This is about power,” said Democratic state Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis. “We are giving up our independence as an equal branch of government.”

The fate of ‘Fair Districts’

A key facet of the governor’s legal defense of the new map is that it does not have to comply with a voter-backed provision of the Florida Constitution, in what even some Republicans have described as an unproven “legal theory.” 

It’s the latest in a long history of the state’s Republican leaders undermining constitutional amendments approved by voters, a key electoral check on legislators’ power.

The Fair Districts Amendment was approved by nearly 63 percent of Florida voters in 2010 to prohibit drawing maps that “favor or disfavor an incumbent or political party” and to preserve the ability of racial and linguistic minorities to “elect representatives of their choice.” But the minority provision was weakened by a state Supreme Court ruling last year that found the state had a “superior obligation” to comply with the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits racially gerrymandered districts.

Testifying before state lawmakers, an attorney for the governor argued that because one part of the Fair Districts Amendment is legally infirm, the entire provision shouldn’t be applied – despite the fact the state Supreme Court has issued no such ruling. 

“If the race-based provision has to fall, then the whole thing has to fall, because these things are not severable,” said Mohammad Jazil, an attorney for the Holtzman Vogel law firm representing the governor. 

“My assessment and my analysis was that partisan intent can be taken into account,” Jazil added.

The governor’s chosen mapmaker testified he did rely on partisan data to draw the map, among other criteria, though Jason Poreda said no single factor predominated. 

Republican state Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, who sponsored the bill in the House, said she believes the case made by the governor’s team.

“I believe that this map is based on a strong and viable interpretation of both the Florida and the United States Constitutions,” she said. “That is why I filed the map and I support it today.”

Bradley, who voted against the map, said the governor’s claim that the entire Fair Districts Amendment should be voided “rests on a legal theory that the Supreme Court has not even opined on.”

“I have a duty to uphold the Constitution that I swore to defend,” she said, adding “I’m a no.”

A norm-shattering redistricting process

Legislators pushed through Florida’s extremely unusual mid-decade redistricting at staggering speed. 

Typically, lawmakers’ map drawing is a months-long deliberative process that comes once a decade and is accompanied by dozens of public hearings across the state, where voters get to voice their opinions and even submit their own maps. 

This time, the governor’s mapmaker drew up the proposal behind closed doors in just two weeks – and was the sole person to lay down the lines, Poreda testified. Though he consulted with other members of the governor’s staff and legal team, Poreda wouldn’t say who.

Members of the public had just two opportunities to testify on the plan, in committee hearings packed so full that speakers were limited to about 30 seconds each.

Just two days after DeSantis unveiled the map to Fox News, lawmakers in both chambers approved it on Wednesday, without a single member publicly defending the measure on the floor, apart from the bill’s sponsors.

“The maps were drawn in secret by the governor’s office. This is not speculation,” said Democratic state Rep. Michele Rayner. “This is not how this chamber works. What happened to the House being the House? We are not a rubber stamp. We are a coequal branch of government.”

In the Senate, Gaetz at times appeared to distance himself from the proposal he was asked to carry – though he ultimately voted for it.

“I’m not defending this map. I’m transmitting this map and explaining the governor’s proposal as it was laid out to us,” Gaetz said.

Gaetz disputed Democrats’ arguments that Republicans are doing the bidding of the White House.

“I can’t speak for the President,” Gaetz told reporters.

“I would assume that he’s responding to the political environment, but he’s not giving orders to me,” Gaetz added.

The bill’s sponsors repeatedly sidestepped questions from their Democratic colleagues, saying they didn’t draw the map and couldn’t speak to its creation – in what critics argued was an attempt to insulate lawmakers from being deposed in the legal challenges sure to follow. The governor’s office is expected to invoke legislative and executive privilege to shield the mapdrawing process from public view.

Lawmakers’ deliberations were interrupted Wednesday by the release of the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in the Louisiana v. Callais case, which significantly weakened a landmark Civil Rights-era law that expanded minority representation in Congress and is expected to reverberate through redistricting cases across the country.

DeSantis had used Callais as a justification to redraw Florida’s maps, anticipating that the high court would categorically ban the consideration of race in redistricting. In fact, the decision was narrower, allowing race to be considered, but only in extremely limited instances.

The decision sparked a flurry of activity in the legislative chambers, where lawmakers could be seen reading the opinion on their laptops or thumbing through its 90-plus pages that were quickly printed off by staff. 

In the Senate, lawmakers took a recess of about an hour to digest the ruling, while in the House, Republicans rejected a request by Democrats to pause consideration of the map to give lawmakers time to understand its implications.

Brian Higgins, a voter from Jacksonville and a lifelong Republican, said he traveled to the Capitol for the first time to testify against the redistricting process, which he called “shameful.”

“What I’m seeing is just a blatant power grab,” Higgins said, adding, “this is just not what this country stands for.”

Kate Payne is The Florida Trib’s state government reporter. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org.